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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Audiences of Herodotus: Oral Performance and the Major Battle Narratives

The Audiences of Herodotus: Oral Performance and the Major Battle Narratives

Oliver, Ian

Paperback

PhilosophyAncient Greece

ISBN10: 1666936227
ISBN13: 9781666936223
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: Jul 23 2026
Pages: 204
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.42 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
By recognizing the pervasive influence that Herodotus's career as an oral performer had on his composition of the Histories, The Audiences of Herodotus: Oral Performance and the Battle Narratives argues that the Histories' versions of the three most important battles in the Persian Wars--the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea--persistently and disproportionately advance the interests, biases, and political agendas of distinct audiences in the mid-fifth century, well before Herodotus assembled his famous work of history as it survives to us. The Salamis and Plataea narratives reflect a mid-century audience of Athenians and their allies; the Thermopylae narrative reflects an Amphictyonic audience gathered at the Pythian Festival. Ian Oliver concludes that, as a participant in a culture of wisdom performance (epideixis), Herodotus originally composed short, ideologically motivated performance pieces that he intended to promote tendentious reinterpretations of these momentous events, then relied on these narratives when he composed his final text: the unitary Histories.

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